Fiber-optic sensors have been utilized in a number of applications, and have been shown to have particular utility in sensing parameters in various environments. Optical fiber sensors can be incorporated into environments such as downhole environments and be used to sense various parameters of an environment and/or the components disposed therein, such as temperature, pressure, strain and vibration.
Parameter monitoring systems can be incorporated with downhole components as fiber-optic distributed sensing systems (DSS). Examples of DSS techniques include Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR), which includes interrogating an optical fiber sensor with an optical signal to generate reflected signals scattered from sensing locations (e.g., fiber Bragg gratings) in the optical fiber sensor.
Swept-wavelength interferometric-based sensing systems, frequently used for distributed fiber-optic sensing, are so-called because they rely upon interferometry to encode the sensor information. In some applications, however, the sensing fiber (the fiber containing or consisting of the sensor(s)) is subject to variations in length. These variations can result in reduced measurement accuracy.